On Wearing the Crown of Arrogance

Posted on July 8, 2003 in Myths & Mysticism Thinking Writing

Ah sharks. I have to reprint part of what I said as a comment at Camassia’s blog. Call it a pique of vanity if you must. Can you believe that someone tried to cast me as “merely quantitative” in the way I approach the world? My father — if he lived — would have a few things to say about that.

This is a revised and edited version of my remarks at Camassia’s. Too often when we shoot off our mouth in comments, we press submit and instantly regret because we left something out. What is written here comes closer to what I really think and feel.

I have no problem with the broad use of certainty. I merely argue that based as it is upon evidence of the senses, it is limited in what it can be used to prove. I am certain that I am sitting in a chair, typing. Characters appear on the screen, I hear the tapping and crash of the keys, I feel them coming up through my fingers. What’s more, it is possible to devise instruments which can measure the impact of my fingers on those keys, the intensity of the sound waves, etc. Certainties allow us to relay these words to you.

The classic response is, of course, to question whether we can truly know anything, whether we’re just prisoners in a demon’s machine as Descartes feared. Such sophistry may be entertaining for those who have never gotten past the questions of freshman level philosophy, but I sleep peacefully at night knowing that there are some things that I can be certain of and accept that there are things that I can never know as an answer. I am also comfortable with the fact that there exist in this world uncertainties which can be turned into certainties, theories that can have the kinks ironed out by the introduction of new evidence.

God is simply not one of those things that can be proved or disproved by the senses. Anyone who says that it can be is suspect in my book. If Christians and others are not supposed to lie, then there are many living in sin because they declare that they can prove or sense for certain the existence of this thing which we have defined as being well beyond our intelligence and our experience.

The God of the Bible is most unimpressive for me: if all He can do is run glosses that any reasonable person can produce without Him, then there’s clear evidence that the Bible is a book written by men for the control of other human beings. It is, in places, one of the finest human creations, but the fact that it is a material object [scribed and printed by humans] limits it. This does not change no matter how many times we replicate it.

[We can only do this a limited number of times because we are limited creatures living on a world with limited resources. Boundlessness is far more than we can handle. To go on:]

But that doesn’t end the question of whether or not there is a higher “intelligence” or “awareness”….

[The question will always be because we are not qualified to answer it.]

The one thing that unites those who I call people of faith and agnostics is humility. To the despair of many believers and atheists, we don’t [present ultimate humility] to [any] worldly authorities, not even the Bible [or other sacred texts purported to be dictated by divine entities]. We live in awe of the Universe, an existence so vast that not a single one of us can begin to comprehend but the tiniest part of it. When Jonathan Edwards characterized us as insects, he was getting close to the Truth of our place in the scheme of things and yet so infinitely far that I cannot describe the distance to you in measureable terms.

If that doesn’t humble you, if you persist in trying to say that you can have final answers where the scope of the Universe is involved, then you must wear the crown of arrogance. As for me, I am always watching to see what unfolds and how our knowledge changes based on new discoveries and insights. I can only know a tiny part and I am satisfied with that. Regardless of how the question is answered or not answered, I will continue to struggle to be a good person among my peers.

Life’s a guessing game. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Was that Joan Didion or Anais Nin?

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To scamper off and make tracks on a tangent in the dust of that breath of hot air:
One thing I admire about the Bible is the ability of those who wrote it to take the images of their world and use them to attempt to teach spiritual truths. Christ’s parable of the mustard seed came to mind while I was hiking near my home a few weeks ago. From the smallest of seeds to the largest of trees…. Black mustard isn’t quite a tree, but there are specimens that I saw that stood a good two feet over my head (I am 6’3 1/2″ — 6’4″ for my mother). Christ got quantitative when he bid his audience to think of the tiny seed in their hand and such plants. The parable worked because he appealed to the senses to make an analogy to something that was not of the senses, that thing we call Faith.

All great people of Spirit use the concrete language of Poetry to point at the gaps which define that which we cannot know by the senses or even be certain of. Divinities may, in fact, not exist, but the emotions are there filling the “God-shaped hole”. The emotions are real.